Coretta Scott King called for a commission to be established to investigate who the true assassin was of Dr. King, 1999. ... read more »

“Some had to pay fees. Some were tested. Many people died for that right. It is too important for us not to vote, and if we want to have a democracy, we need to participate in it. We can’t hope that situations will change. We have to be active in helping candidates get elected who will create that change,” said Lex Scott, the president of the Black Lives Matter Utah Chapter. ... read more »

During the civil rights phase of the Black Freedom Movement, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) chose as its motto: “To Save the Soul of America.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., SCLC’s principal theorist and social philosopher, explained that it was really to reaffirm that “America would never be free or saved from itself” until African Americans are freed “completely from the shackles they still wear.” He said it was a question of concern for the integrity and life of America. And as I read it, it is a question concerning the very life and death of the people of America, caught up, at that time, in a monstrously immoral war against the Vietnamese people and wasting lives and resources better spent on the well-being of the American people. ... read more »

“It is not surprising that voters overall rate the economy as the most important issue impacting their vote for president this year given the fragile state of the U.S. economy and their tendency historically to prioritize it and other issues such as national security and education,” Gallup pollsters observed. ... read more »

As the presidential campaigns heat up, Americans are provided with a stark choice of leaders. The visits to Kenosha of Donald Trump and Joe Biden provide clear contrasts for all to see. ... read more »

Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) has introduced several bills, including the Juvenile Accountability Block Grant Reauthorization and Bullying Prevention and Intervention Act, H.R. 71, the Federal Prison Bureau Nonviolent Offender Relief Act of 2015, and H.R. 4660, an Amendment to the Commerce, Justice, and Science Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2015 affirming the authority of the Attorney General to reduce prison overcrowding by developing and implementing lawful policies relating to requests for executive clemency from deserving petitioners. ... read more »

The Black Hollywood Education and Resource Center (BHERC) exhibition “The Forgotten” wall, an addition to the BHERC “Say Their Name” exhibition in Los Angeles, CA., are 57 names of Black men and women identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) that succumbed to racial violence between 1952 to 1968. The addition compliments the original special collection of names researched and first installed over the 2020 Independence Day weekend that is presented as a sobering memorial display of 41 individual markers of the names of men and women in memoriam who were killed by police violence in more recent times.  ... read more »

The greatest athletes in America are standing up for justice at a critical time. Despite unprecedented, multiracial demonstrations across the country protesting police violence against African Americans, the horrors keep on coming. ... read more »

Councilmember Curren Price on Aug. 25 introduced a motion to rename a stretch of Figueroa Street from Olympic Boulevard to Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard in honor of the basketball great Kobe Bryant, ... read more »

Clearly, there are several lessons to be gleaned from the legacy of these freedom warriors and workers for a new society and world. And the first is to rightfully locate them in Black history among their people, our people in the midst of an unfinished and ongoing Black freedom struggle. Indeed, there can be no correct understanding, appropriate appreciation or honest emulation of their lives and the lives of all those who preceded them and made them and us possible and of those who were their co-combatants, unless we place them all in the context of their people, our people, Black people and our struggle. ... read more »

Los Angeles high school sophomore Zsateau Bouyer has a passion for sprinting, she is ready to improve the school’s track program with her dedication. When the Romans track and field team needed more participants, she urged schoolmates to compete with her. ... read more / watch video »

"At 9:22 p.m. this evening, April 6, my father and hero, Earl Graves, Sr., the founder of Black Enterprise, passed away quietly after a long battle with Alzheimer's," Earl Graves Jr. wrote on Twitter. "I loved and admired this giant of a man and am blessed to be his namesake. Love you, dad." ... read more »

You might think that the kind of generational poverty that would concern a global powerhouse like the United States of America, let alone the paradise we call Southern California, is a non-conversation in this country. Yet the special rapport on poverty, racial equity, and human rights is an appropriate link. The notion that we have a low unemployment rate, but a high under-employment rate, increased homelessness, immigration, food insecurity, poor education, immigration political wars, and racial inequity, when correctly interpreted, the numbers suggest that we have an urgent problem. ... read more »

SCLC is planning a new Poor People’s Campaign focused on empowerment, education and food for those in poverty. ... read more »

James W. Sweeney was born in Fresno, California on July 28, 1948, to the union of Lonnie Lee Sweeney and Evelyn Randle. He is the younger of two sons born to this union. Sweeney’s parents, and his brother Sherman Sr., preceded him in death. ... read more »